Don’t let this bill pass:

The Senate is scheduled to vote on the internet censorship bill SOPA on Tuesday, January 24th.
This bill will kill jobs and stifle innovation, undermine cyber security, risk censoring the American Internet, and provide cover for totalitarian regimes that want to undermine Internet freedom abroad.

Watch this video:

PROTECT IP / SOPA Breaks The Internet from Fight for the Future on Vimeo.

Take Action Now:

Don’t answer that tweet or reply to your friends message on Facebook – TAKE ACTION NOW!

Quality websites  – on a tight budget

We have just launched a new website design service today to cater for those looking for a quality website solution on a tight budget. And in these tough economic times who wouldn’t have a tight budget? So we thought about this (but not for long) and came up with a great value small budget website solution based around the solid and proven WordPress platform.

Here’s the deal:

• 1 x Domain name registration & setup
• 1 x Email setup
• 1 Years hosting
• Professional Design
• Blog
• Plugins
• Fully Content Managed
• Video Support and Help

You can see more details about this deal here!

So you get the idea, 90% of the challenge of getting online has been taken care of, and you get it all for £499.

Why offer a budget website solution?

We regularly get asked to make small business/personal websites (on a tight budget) and we often turn these down because they are simply not cost effective for us. Most of the work we do is bespoke, to fit our clients precise needs. Personally, I have always felt uncomfortable turning any business away but I suppose its not a bad problem to have. Most of these budget requests were from people who had limited computer and internet knowledge; sure they could browse the internet, use email and login to facebook but website design, domain names and hosting were a bit of a conundrum. Surprisingly, knowing where to go or even what to look for could be a challenge.

Time is precious but a bit of personal service is still important

We know there are many budget website solutions out there today already , and some are better than others ; however many lack an element of personal service (IE: speaking to a real person about what you like and want) or they have a high interface knowledge expectation or ‘hike’ as we call it. In laymen terms this means users are expected to grasp quite technical design ideas and terminology, and spend rather a long time figuring it all out to end up with a website. And lets face it time is our most precious commodity so that’s why we decided to offer a great value budget service ( we’ve obviously crunched the numbers to make it cost effective for us)

We have yet to see how popular this service maybe as its fresh out of the oven, but at least we don’t have to turn the ‘small budget’ business away

Well according to some speculators this mock up 3d render was based on a leaked blueprint design document. Apparently a little shorter and thinner than the iPhone 4 but still maintaining the standard 4 inch screen (but nobody’s sure?). You will notice the reduced distance from the top of the iPhone and the edge of the screen, which is to potentially allow for Apples “swipe down” from the top of the screen notification system in iOS 5.

There is some speculation that the larger more oval shaped Home Button will accommodate gestures for more efficient multitasking between Apps…. but can’t you do that already on the screen? You can also see a tapered back which also is going to be aluminum doing away with the current glass finish.

A few Rumored Functionality enhancements

• Near Field Communication

The new iPhone 5 may include an NFC (near field communication) chip which would enable it to be used with payment services such as Google’s Wallet service. For those not familiar with this service it basically allows you to pay for stuff using your phone, doing away with debit and credit cards. It can also be used to store electronic tickets, download music and swap photos and business cards. But isn’t there an App for that?

• Voice Recognition

Apple did acquire voice-based personal assistant service Siri last year but nobody is still sure what they might do with it? The iPhone 5 will apparently come with built in voice recognition for a variety cool functions, which lets face it is the most natural way to communicate with your phone.

• 1080p video recording – 8 Megapixel Camera

An 8 megapixel camera and full 1080p video recording and larger screen are potential improvements. Considering that many Android phones already boast these features Apple may be ensuring they are competing strongly in this department. Obviously these features will require a bit more umph in the power department so a larger battery could be required?

Expected Launch – 4th October?

As expected the launch is surrounded by secrecy, with component makers who supply parts and assemble the new iPhone reluctant to leak any details for fear of losing contracts with Apple (Well, apart from that leaked blueprint design document). One recent court case in the US detailed how a Samsung employee gave details of screen sizes to US analysts ahead of the release of the iPad; Apple cut Samsung’s contract soon afterwards. Personally, we think that ‘leaking’ is all part of a strategic marketing plan that many large companies employ to get the consumer juices flowing, prior to a launch.

So when the iPhone 5 does eventually launch; apparently on the 4th October will you be one of those tired looking techno-geeks camping outside your local phone shop days before the release? Maybe not, but ones thing for sure Apple do make very cool technology.

Anyway, rumors and speculation are abound when ever Apple is about to launch a new iPhone. Lets hope the real deal won’t disappoint and not be another style reincarnation that doesn’t deliver true improved functionality?

Have you been approached by an SEO expert?

I’m sure like us, many online business owners have been approached by SEO Experts claiming to improve their website ranking. Well recently one of our clients was persistently hit with SEO proposals from a particular “expert” (who shall remain nameless). We are not claiming that SEO expertise is not a valuable service, we are just questioning the validity of the expertise put forward.

How our client was approached

Our client recieved several emails from the SEO expert stating that huge improvements to their website ranking could be made. Even though our client stated on several occasions that they were not interested (as business was brisk), the expert produced a ‘diagnostic report’ (free of charge) to our client. This is when our client notified us to check out the report because in their words ….” we don’t understand what any of this means, and why have we got such a bad score?”….

The FREE SEO Diagnostic Report

The report listed out various areas of our clients website performance, with a score based system to indicate where things could be improved. Fair enough you might think? But looking closer we realised that “the expert” had used a free online website diagnostic reporting tool to produce the report. The give-away for us was how general and non-specific the data contained in the report was to our client. After a little searching we found the free online diagnostic tool which raised immediate concerns for the validity of the report and the relevance of particular data to our client.

Needless to say the report contained nothing more than data produced by a diagnostic robot, little explanation of the data and no real strategic information on what the expert would achieve for our client.

Watch out for the negative sell or ‘scare-mongering’

Now we know that there probably isn’t a website in existence that couldn’t do with some on-going SEO improvements, but watch out for the negative sell! The report scored our clients website 22.26% out of 100% (reassuringly we scored 100% for the technical delivery of our clients website). Although our client did not fully understand the data in the report, seeing such a low score instilled a state of panic and insecurity about the performance of their website.

This ‘negative sell’ approach should ALWAYS raise concerns in any area of business . It is very easy to critique something but much harder to validate your performance and be held accountable for the results with a ‘positive sell’. Online Business owners don’t want to be panicked or scare-mongered into making decisions they want informed tangible strategies which they can understand. Furthermore, these strategies must make a measurable difference to their business.

And Finally – a simple test

After about 5 minutes of reassuring our client we thought How easy is it to find our so called ‘SEO Expert’ Online?

Surely as an “SEO expert” we would find him easily right?….. WRONG!

We did the most basic test:

Q) Can you find the “SEO expert’s website” in Google by typing in the “name of the SEO expert’s company”? (Bearing in mind that the name of the company is included in the SEO expert’s  URL) and we know that Google gives massive priority to search terms contained in an URL.

A) NO? and we went over 5 pages deep…. before we got bored.

The Morals of this experience

• Practice what you preach!…..before you sell.

• Make ANY expert accountable for real results that will make a measurable difference to your business.

• Statistics are meaningless without a clear explanation.

• Website ranking is very important but not the end goal for online success.

We have just installed it, and being able to watch real time user behavior on your site is highly addictive.

How It Works

1. Just sign up for one of Woopra’s packages paid or FREE depending on the amount of websites and traffic you wish to track.
2. Download and install the Woopra dashboard.
3. And like most website analytics software you just embed a simple snippet of JS into your webpages.

Unlike other solutions you get to see real time user behavior and even engage with them using the built in ‘ Live Chat ‘ facility. The user can either accept or reject the chat, but either way it provides a mechanism to immediately engage with an already captive audience. How useful or intrusive this feature may become is yet to be seen, but from a user perspective getting instant answers to critical product / service related questions could be the difference between spending or not?

The Dashboard

Its nicely laid out and easy to use with lots of nice features, here’s just a few:

• Visitor Tracking – see which pages users are viewing but also display their location (country, state and city), their system setup (operating system, browser and screen resolution), the company or ISP they’re visiting your website from, their IP address.
• Funnel Analytics – To complete a conversion, a visitor has to go through one or more goals (ex: sign up, confirm email, add to cart then checkout). Funnels in Woopra help you spot where visitors drop off during the path to completing goals.
• Live Map – See your visitors geographic location on a world map.
• Multiple Websites – Track multiple websites in one convenient place and switch between them instantly.
• Visitor search – Every single user action and visit is saved on the cloud and is fully searchable so you never miss a click.

Check out all the features at http://www.woopra.com

Overall we think its a very useful tool for developers to have in their arsenal and the bennefits of real time tracking over historic methods are clear to see!

Case Study

Bath Oral Surgery Clinic had not received any online referrals for a long time and after a brief review of the existing site it was clear why….

The OLD Referral Form

The OLD Referral form – Why it wasn’t working for them?

Considering that the primary objective of the website was to win new referral business, there were no clear calls to action to the referral form, anywhere within the website. The user had to select the ‘Practitioners Area’ link within the main navigation (see pic above) to reveal another sub-navigational link to the ‘referral form’…. effectively forcing the user to find or stumble upon it.

The form itself contained a number of potential barriers to its completion by a user. Here’s just a few:

1. The form was far too long: Expecting users to provide this much information in one go is very optimistic considering the reward trade off.
2. The form did not differentiate between the needs of its potential user groups: Tim Milton (MD) stated that he wanted both Practitioners to refer their Patients and Patients to refer themselves. Looking at the use of language throughout the form it was clear that it was primarily targeting Practitioners, patients won’t necessarily know if they are suffering from ‘Pericoronitis’? or supplying radiographs.
3. Human /No – Validation: And I’m not talking strict checking, I mean… none? You could literally submit an empty form. Well, almost …. whoever built this decided that a ‘continue’ button (see pic above) would be better than a ‘submit’ or ‘send’ button?. That might be acceptable if there was another stage to the form but alas, pressing the ‘continue’ button jumped you to the top of the form to read a polite message stating …” Please check to see that you have entered all the fields correctly, thankyou!”… ( this was shown regardless of the form having data entered or not). I’ve seen some interesting concepts in validating form data, but don’t think I’ve seen a prompt for a human based check?

I could extend this list but you get the idea.

Our referral form enhancements

I simply asked Tim Milton what was the most essential data he needed to collect from the referral form, to get potential business “through the door”?. Non essential data could be gathered later once initial contact was made. This allowed us to reduce the amount of questions by at least a third. We rebuilt the form from scratch ensuring:

• Proper validation checks were made
• descriptive feedback (hover texts) were applied to key fields to help guide the 2 user groups
• Non-relevant fields were hidden from the patient user group based on the selection made at the beginning of the form.

Click here to see the live form

Our general enhancements

Apart from giving the overall design hierarchy and structure we placed 2 strong calls to action on the home page to target the 2 referral user groups. We also placed another call to action which sat above the main navigation on all pages to ensure that the user could refer themselves with one click from anywhere in the site.

The effectiveness of these enhancements has yet to be seen but we believe we have significantly improved the chances of Bath Oral Surgery Clinic receiving a referral.

We have just launched our new site! What do you think?

It took a little longer than expected but client work comes first right?. Looking forward to filling this blog with little tasty morsels of web goodness and knowledge from the Caveware team. Watch this space…